The Other Others

Australian Indigenous Elders Anne Poelina and Mary Graham share with Megan Kelleher (my spouse) and I, about the Law of the land and First Peoples, as well as Songlines. Megs had to leave half way through for family biz, so we didn't get to some of the big stuff she was bringing about spatial relation and cognition, but we will come back to that yarn later. This is a good example of how messy and vibrant yarns can be - these Aunties hit the ground running and left no space for the niceties of introductions or explanations! Just try and keep up.

Listen through for one of the finest Jordan Peterson impressions you'll ever hear. Sound for this episode isn't great, but you know what? Stop being such an audio snob! When I was a kid we only had cassette tapes recorded off the radio and it was fine. Suck it up and have a listen. This is an intimate yarn reflecting on personal experiences of online radicalisation and the old rabbit-hole, with Jordan Price, a young Gunditjmara fella who has lived with chronic pain all his life and sought agency through self-reliance philosophies, largely curated through a YouTube algorithm. I've known him since he was a kid, watching him struggle bravely through his pain during hours of hard dancing in corroboree. He's found a defiant kind of inspiration in his culture, but also in Nietzche, Macchiavelli, Jesse Ventura, 9-11 truthers and Jordan Peterson. I haven't seen him in a few years, and we reflect on the carnage of the last decade, since our first innocent online encounters with big foot, the Kennedy assassination, flat earth theory and the Mayan calendar. There is a universe of raw and troubling stories to unravel in this hour.

What happens when you put two middle aged Aboriginal nerds with adult ADHD together on one zoom call? Nothing good. Rick Shaw is a Gamilaroi mathematician who works on algorithms for Deloitte, and spends quite a bit of his remaining hours slapping my brain around the room like a cat with a half-dead rat. He used to model and monitor extreme events like terrorism and hurricanes. Now he's monitoring me. Our yarn was interrupted by his daughter charging round on a horse and my spouse panic-buying ethereum in the background. According to Rick's bush-physicist's unified field theory, that's good chaos and we need to embrace it.

Jacqueline Jennings, mixed heritage Cree, Anishinaabe, Métis and settler descent, is 2nd generation residential school survivor from Canada - a self-made woman who started out with nothing but a turkey feather (not even an emerald mine to get the ball rolling). She has found herself in a very unique position as an entrepreneur and investor who is now navigating the world of Indigenous finance at Raven Capital, where her team brings the traditional role and protocols of The Intermediary to bear in a way that is seeding some interesting disruptive innovations, seeds intended to grow over seven generations. I was heartened to see that her work is neither Indigenised finance nor financialised indigeneity, but something else entirely. I gained some helpful clues about risk management and the issue of trading beyond spheres of trust at scale, but also some troubling wake-up calls about the impossibilities of allowing land to be anything but capital without sparking a global catastrophe. In the end, it's your body or your land as collateral, and you can have skin in the game or be somebody else's skin in the game. Maybe. As long as we remember that the house always wins.

Melanie Goodchild, Moose Clan, Anishinaabe (Ojibway or Chippewa) from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketegaunseebee, co-founder of the Turtle Island Institute, talks about her group's work in conducting traditional processes of inquiry in dialogue with Systems Thinking and Complexity science, mediated through a council of Elders. My family and I have been sitting in ritual yarns with Melanie and her family for a while now, and we are ready to share some of the knowledge that lives in the relational connection between us.

Heir to the silent fallout of multiple genocides, Monika Bielskyte is one of those ordinary people who has fallen through the cracks of industrial identities, gone through the fire, evolved some salamander traits and emerged to do extraordinary things. A denizen of liminal country, Monika's medium is cybernetics and intensive pluralist praxis in this area has produced some high level insights about global imperialism and its incursions into the realms of AR and VR. I once did a ceremony with Ainu people and I put myself in that headspace for this interview, to better connect with Monika's grandmother's people. Trigger warning - anti-woke folk might hear some things in here they won't like much. More on Monika's protopian future visioning here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZLLW2y4eo

Prof.  Deen Sanders OAM is a Worimi man who has wandered the intrepid space  between Western systems of corporate life, law, academia, psychology  and government; and the Indigenous culture and knowledge systems that  shape his relationship with the world. Brother  Deen always has a nuanced analysis of wicked problems, to which he  applies an Indigenous complexity lens and a mastery of many disciplines.  We point that weapon today at disinformation and bad faith discourse,  which have migrated from the digital world and into our lives. Parts of  this interview also appear in another podcast I do called Disconnect, a  show about Indigenous engagement with IT.

This is startling and spontaneous yarn about economic transitions, imperialism, re-imagining value, colonial script, and much more. It's good and long, as yarns are when they're worth having. Join Mike New, founder of Smart Enterprise Villages and intentional community economy guru, his libertarian operative mate Frank (who might be Satoshi Nakamoto), and my spouse Megan Kelleher (Indigenous blockchain savant) in a free range and sometimes dangerous yarn about money and value. And Jack and the Beanstalk. And about how knocking someone out in a pub can be considered "proof of work" in a relational credit economy! We also perform a live lab experiment on the effects of microwaves on the Zoom signal.

Tina Ngata is a Maori activist, community legend and writer who has her finger on the pulse of a problem almost nobody is talking about - the radicalization of Indigenous communities through disinformation online. The thing is though, whose problem is this? Is disinformation a new thing or just a digital version of the classic colonial toolkit for nation-building on the lands of others? Is it becoming a self-organizing system that has achieved something of a singularity and decided to turn on its masters?

Non-Indigenous people are always wondering how (a) they can get access to Indigenous culture and knowledge, and (b) whether it is possible for them to return to this way of being. Well, yes and yes, but not in the way you think. The way into this world is through your own door. I talk to Frisian (Netherlands Indigenous) scholar Michel Gruber and Nordic animist Rune Hjarno Rasmussen, about the ancient Viking practice of Finnfaring - studying under Indigenous masters to increase knowledge of land and spirit, sustainable economies and governance, while remaining firmly planted in your own culture of origin and appropriating nothing. It's all in the yarns.